The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  The farmer says, “No, Mr. Snake, you’ll bite me.” Said, “I know it.”

  “No, I wouldn’t bite.” Said, “Let me tell you, Mr. Farmer, I’m just cold. Don’t you know I wouldn’t bite you after you warmed me up?”

  Said, “No. . . . But you a snake.”

  Said, “Mr. Farmer, I won’t bite you. Just warm me up, please . . .”

  Said, “No. . . . But you a snake.”

  Said, “Mr. Farmer, I won’t bite you. Just warm me up, please . . .”

  Farmer take him up and unbutton his shirt, put him in his bosom. Oh, he’s a great big snake. I think he must have been a rattlesnake. . . . And so he plowed along until about nine o’clock. He stopped his mules and unbuttons his bosom, and he pulled it out, like this, you know, and he looks down in there, says, “How you feel, Mr. Snake?”

  He says, “Well, I feel a little better. I’m kind of warming up.”

  “Good, good.” Says, “Gitty-up!” So he goes around and he plows till about ten thirty. Then, “Whoa!” Mules stop. He opens his bosom, and he looked down, and he says, “How you feel, Mr. Snake?”

  He says, “Well, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m warming up good.”

  He says, “Good, good. Gitty-up!” Mules started on up, and he plowed and he plowed till about eleven thirty. And so he could feel the snake kind of twisting, you know, and he just stopped, you know. Pulled his . . . shirt out and looks in his bosom again.

  “How you feel, Mr. Snake?”

  Says, “Oh, I’m feeling a whole lot better. I’m warming up. You feel me moving?”

  Said, “Yeah! I thought you was doing better.”

  “Yes, I’m feeling a whole lot better.”

  “Well,” farmer says, “Well, I’ll be out plowing awhile longer, and I’ll quit and go to dinner, then I’m going to get my dinner and put him out at the end.”

  So he plowed till about fifteen minutes till twelve. He pulled out his shirt and he looked down there again. He said, “Well how are you, Mr. Snake?”

  Says, “Oh, I’m warm. I’m just feeling good.”

  He says, “Good.” Says, “Well, I’ll go a round or two, and then when I get ready to go to dinner, I’ll put you out at the end.” So he plowed around, and when he got near about back, Snake didn’t wait for him to open his shirt. He done stuck his head out, twitching away out between the shirt buttons, and looking at him in his face and licking out his tongue. Well, a snake’s angry. Every time he see you and go to licking out his tongue, he’s mad. And the farmer knew he’s going to bite then.

  He said, “Now, Mr. Snake.” Said, “Now you told me you wouldn’t bite me after I warmed you.”

  “Yeah. But you knowed that I’s a snake.”

  He said, “Yeah. But . . . don’t do that, don’t bite me. Please.”

  “You see, I’m a snake. I’m supposed to bite you.”

  He said, “Yeah, but you told me you wasn’t going to bite me.”

  “Yeah, but you know I’s a snake before. I’m supposed to bite you, and you know that.” So he all went on and bit the farmer, right in the mouth. His face begin to swell, so he goes to the house, running. He didn’t take time to take his mules out of there. Went in.

  Wife says, “Well, what the matter?”

  He said, “Well, Mr. Snake. I seen him out there in the field. I plowed him up, and he said he was so cold he was stiff. And if I would warm him up, he would not bite me.” And said, “After I got him warm, he bit me in the face.” And said, “Let me tell you one lesson. Don’t care when you see a snake, don’t never warm him, put him in your bosom, put him up, cause when he gets warm, he’s sure going to bite you.”

  Then he laid down and died.

  And that’s why he left word with his wife, “Don’t never fool with a snake.”

  SOURCE: Carl Lindahl, ed. American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress, 191–93.

  THE TORTOISE AND THE TOAD

  A lot of her stories were lies, but some might have been true. Well, let’s say I thought they were lies, though the others thought they were the truth. Heaven help anyone who tried to tell one of those old women she was wrong!

  I remember the story of the tortoise and the toad; she must have told it to me a hundred times. The tortoise and the toad had this big feud going for years, and the toad used to deceive the tortoise because he was frightened of her and thought she was stronger than him. One day the toad got hold of a big bowl of food and presented it to the tortoise, setting it down right under her nose, almost in her mouth. When the tortoise saw the bowl she took a fancy to it and gobbled it so fast she choked. It never even crossed her mind that the toad had put it there for a reason. She was very simple-minded, and so it was easy to trick her. After that, feeling full and satisfied, she started wandering through the forest in search of the toad, who had hidden himself in a cave. When the toad saw her in the distance, he called out, “Here I am, tortoise, look.” She looked but couldn’t see him, and after a while she got tired and went away til she came across a heap of dry straw and lay down to sleep. The toad seized her while she was asleep and poisoned her by peeing over her, and she didn’t even wake up because she had eaten so heavily. The moral of this story is that people shouldn’t be greedy, and you should trust no one. An enemy might offer you a meal merely to trick you.

  SOURCE: Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 183–84.

  In the celebrated story of his life, the Cuban runaway slave Esteban Montejo describes hearing Ma Lucia tell stories about life in Africa. He begins with a meditation on the stories as “lies” and ends by extracting a moral from one tale told to him.

  PART VI

  JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS AND THE UNCLE REMUS TALES

  As far as I’m concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage.

  —ALICE WALKER, “The Dummy in the Window: Joel

  Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus”

  Joel Chandler Harris once declared that he was not really the creative genius behind the Uncle Remus tales. All he had done was to channel and write down the words of a mysterious second self. “As for myself—though you could hardly call me a real, sure enough author—I never have anything but the vaguest ideas of what I am going to write; but when I take pen in my hand, the rust clears away and the ‘other fellow’ takes charge” (Julia Collier Harris 345). In a sense, neither Harris nor Uncle Remus wrote down the tales. Instead they are penned by an elusive figure who stands in between, listening and retelling. That raconteur is a mix of Harris, the Southern journalist, with nostalgic views about plantation life in the Old South, and Uncle Remus, the embodied presence of a fierce storytelling tradition that was itself divided, doubly coded, and fiercely committed to speaking truth to power through indirection.

  Harris’s literary renown and his role in undertaking the first large-scale effort to collect African American lore challenge us to think hard about the minstrel aspects of the Uncle Remus Stories. As Robert Hemenway points out, Harris had a “deep need to imagine himself as Uncle Remus” (1982, 16). He impersonated as he appropriated, mimicking black speech and priding himself on his fine ear for dialect. He often referred to himself as Uncle Remus and signed letters using that name. And he was flattered that the president of the United States referred to him as Uncle Remus. The assertion that the “other fellow” writes the stories collapses under the pressure of telling moments in real life. The “other fellow” is in fact Joel Chandler Harris performing Uncle Remus in classic minstrel fashion.

  This portrait of Harris was the frontispiece for his fictionalized memoir On the Plantation, published in 1892.

  “Presidents may come and presidents may go,” Theodore Roosevelt once said at a White House dinner, “but Uncle Remus stays put” (Bickley 1978, 58). Roosevelt’s wife Edith told Harris that she read his stories to “the little folk” on “nearly every night” of her life. For Mark Twain, Harris was the “oracle of the nursery,” and children in the United States grew u
p with tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, stories about Laughing Places and Aunt Nancy’s House, as well as fables about Tar Babies and Squinch Owls. What was once part of a living oral tradition of adaptation and improvisation was put into fixed letters on the printed page. And a vibrant storytelling culture for adults began its long migration from campfires and slave cabins into the nursery. The move to turn the tales into harmless entertainments for the young had its beginnings in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1880.

  As spokesman for what has been called the “Arcadian South of Aunt Jemima [and] Uncle Ben,” Joel Chandler Harris and his stories have come under heavy fire in the past decades (Cartwright 2002, 129). The author of the Uncle Remus stories famously extolled the virtues of the antebellum South in an essay called “The Old Plantation,” in which he mourned the demise of a culture that had “passed away” but that retained “the sweet suggestions of poetry and romance—memorials that neither death nor decay can destroy” (1877, 2). Books like Thomas Nelson Page’s Social Life in Old Virginia before the War continued to extol plantation life as late as 1897: “The peace of it all was only emphasized by the sounds that broke upon it; the call of ploughers to their teams; the shrill shouts of children; the chant of women over their work. . . . Far off, in the fields, the white-shirted ‘ploughers’ followed singing their slow teams in the fresh furrows, wagons rattled, and oxcarts crawled along . . . loud shouts and peals of laughter, mellowed by the distance, floating up from time to time, telling that the heart was light and the toil not too heavy” (1897, 27–28). We do not hear these sounds: “The lashes given a slave during a flogging might be ten or fifty or two hundred—or at least there is evidence to that effect. Of course two hundred blows usually meant a death sentence if administered at one time, so such a sentence was nearly always meted out twenty-five or fifty blows on different dates” (Saxon 234).

  Any value attached to Joel Chandler Harris’s attention to vernacular performance and his insistence on the African origins of the tales (scholars looked to India, to Native American cultures, and to Europe—anywhere but Africa—for prototypes) has been tarnished not only by the minstrel aspects of the project but also by the collection’s frame narrative. In this utopian depiction of Southern plantation life as one community, deep bonds of affection join slave cabins to “big houses” and mansions. And yet the narrative frame that gives us Uncle Remus in conversation with the little boy also exposes—perhaps unwittingly through the “other fellow”—the cruel contradictions of an economic and social nexus that created a vast system of dislocation, exploitation, and disenfranchisement.

  The voice of the “other fellow” was one that Alice Walker, born, like Joel Chandler Harris, in Eatonton, Georgia, could not tolerate. For her, Disney’s Song of the South, inspired by the Uncle Remus stories, “killed” the stories she had heard as a child. “We no longer listened to them,” she declared with mournful outrage. Walker describes a childhood enlivened by the stories both parents told, blending their voices together to produce a narrative. Poverty could not diminish the poetry of these tales: “Both of my parents were excellent storytellers, and wherever we lived, no matter how poor the house, we had fireplaces and a front porch. It was around the fireplaces and on the porch that I first heard, from my parents’ lips—my mother filling in my father’s pauses, and he filling in hers—the stories that I later learned were Uncle Remus stories.”

  When did Alice Walker learn that Uncle Remus was the “source” of those stories? She went to the movies with her parents and watched Song of the South. That event, which took place in a segregated theater, was a double insult. Not only were black children and their parents in the “colored section,” but those same children and parents were obliged to witness their cultural property transferred to white children: “Uncle Remus in the movie saw fit largely to ignore his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage—indeed, our birthright—to patronizing white children, who seemed to regard him as a kind of talking teddy bear” (1981, 29–31).

  Disney’s Song of the South did more than appropriate African American lore, transferring it from the intimacy of the porch, the fireside, and other close-knit communal settings to the big screen. With one stroke, the local became the global. Improvisation, banter, chitchat, and small talk were turned into monolithic forms, cartoon images set in celluloid frames and words frozen into a sound track. Italo Calvino once shrewdly observed that “folktales remain merely dumb until you realize that you are required to complete them yourself, to fill in your own particulars” (Parr and Campbell 2012, 127). Now Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Tar-Baby were imagined for audiences, with no gaps left and few windows of opportunity for conversation and debate. The stories themselves were turned into cartoon versions of themselves, banished to the nursery as comic entertainments for the young.

  Still, why let Joel Chandler Harris or Song of the South kill Brer Rabbit? As Robert Bone tells us in a meditation on Uncle Remus and the oral tradition: “To neglect the Brer Rabbit tales because a white man was the first to write them down is to betray the black man’s folk tradition” (Bickley 1981, 135). Joel Chandler Harris may have been an interloper and intruder in the cabins where he went to eavesdrop and collect. He may also have created a grotesquely distorted picture of plantation life as serene and untroubled. “What days they were—those days on the old plantation!” he declared in all seriousness. But he did create a record of sorts, one that allows us to see, if only through a glass darkly, evening diversions in an era lacking not only electronic entertainments but also nearly every form of art requiring more than the human voice. Brer Rabbit has been around for far longer than Joel Chandler Harris, who took what he found from an oral tradition of African American storytellers and worked hard to avoid “cooking” the tales, as he put it.

  If any collection evokes the hushed-up paradoxes of African American folklore, it is Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. With a powerfully dissonant relationship between the romance of the frame and the ferocity of the tales, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (originally entitled Uncle Remus’s Folk-Lore), like the volumes that followed it, will not let us forget that beneath the thin veneer of polite affability in the social world there is a turbulent mix of toxic rivalries and murderous hostility. The frame features a scene of hospitality, with Uncle Remus telling tales and the little boy periodically bringing ginger cookies and mince pie to his host. But the tales themselves alert listeners to the dangers of rolling out the welcome mat. The characters in them are constantly violating the rules of hospitality, with both hosts and guests refusing to mind their manners, especially at mealtime (Keenan 1984, 59). Alarm bells rightly go off at the mention of supper. The appetites may be animal and the passions may play out among beasts, but the beasts become our curved mirrors, looking-glasses that reflect back to us not only who we are but how we relate to each other across racial boundaries (Sundquist 1993, 344).

  Bernard Wolfe famously described Uncle Remus as the Negro “grinner-giver,” a figure who is kept subservient through threats and fear and who must all the while appear amiable and eager to please. Paul Laurence Dunbar also called attention to the perpetual masquerade of “grins and lies” performed by blacks over the centuries in his poem “We Wear the Mask.” Uncle Remus’s “beaming countenance” and his “mellow” voice, always “cheerful” and “good-humored,” delight the young master’s son, who sits on Remus’s knee and “nestles” in his lap. The two bond over the stories, and, save for an occasional reprimand, there appears to be nothing but love and affection coursing between the two, as the boy listens with wide-eyed wonder to the wisdom and wit of the old man. No racial or generational conflicts enter into this idyllic scene. Nothing of the stand-off between a “proud and insolent” youth facing down a “dark and sinister” foe, as in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, another work that features the trope of the puer/senex pairing. What we have is not even close to the complex and nuanced Huck and Jim friendship in Mark Twain’s 188
4 novel, a work that may have been influenced by Harris’s frame narrative. Instead Joel Chandler Harris gives us, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a study in contrasts, pure and simple, a young, innocent white child and a decrepit and aging, but wise and loving “old time darky.”

  Uncle Remus is a literary construct, animated by Harris’s fantasies about plantation life and the quasi-paternal affection between a black man and a white boy. Brer Rabbit by contrast, and his confrères, are all rough-and-tumble communal creations, figures brought to life by collective cultural work. It is precisely the friction between the two that makes sparks fly. On the one hand, we have the quiet dignity of a bearded and bespectacled figure who passes on wisdom and experience; on the other the antics of an outlaw with dreadful manners—a crafty beast who is anything but a good example for the young.

  Just who was Uncle Remus? Joel Chandler Harris tells us that he was not an invention of his own, but a “human syndicate.” One member of that syndicate was surely Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, who seems to have migrated effortlessly into Harris’s frame from the Shelby plantation. Caught in an idyllic eternal present with the Little Boy, Uncle Remus reenacts every evening a scene of doting tenderness and loving storytelling. Without giving us the history behind the “rough, weather-beaten face” that “beams” kindly on the little boy, Harris lures us into an immersive drama that enraptures rather than arouses. Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, who let the scenes that unfold in Uncle Tom’s cabin move readers to protest and intervention, Joel Chandler Harris was content to replay the fantasy of the “beauty” and “tenderness” of “the old plantation as we remember it” (Bernstein 2011, 139–40).

  Literary influences played a role in making Uncle Remus who he was. But Harris also acknowledged the role of real-life informants. He admitted to creating the “human syndicate” of Uncle Remus from “three or four old darkies whom I knew.” The process is described with singularly aggressive force: “I just walloped them together into one person and called him ‘Uncle Remus.’ ”